As part of Jessica’s birthday celebration, Soshified Philippines’ (SSFph) decided to hold a fundraising campaign for a chosen charity. From a list of institutions, SSFPH chose Operation Smile Philippines to be the beneficiary of this project.

Operation Smile (OS) is a private, not-for-profit volunteer medical services organization and worldwide children’s medical charity headquartered in Norfolk, California that provides reconstructive Dental Surgery and related health care to indigent children and young adults (Operation Smile Fact Sheet). The organization employs volunteer medical staff and donations from its sponsors to operate on children with facial deformities like cleft lip or cleft palate. It has weeklong medical missions on selected areas throughout the year. Operation Smile’s reach extend to over 60 countries including the Philippines. (http://www.operationsmile.org/)

Last March 02, 2011, SSFph representatives met with Operation Smile’s development and marketing manager Albert Santos and exchanged information about both organizations. After the introductions, the fundraising project was discussed. The project was an online donation drive modeled after Soshified’s previous charity projects like the “Sowons from SONEs” Charity Project. It would use SSFPH’s online accounts to facilitate donations. It would start ASAP and end on Jessica’ birthday celebration. Operations Smile gave its support for the project and SSFPH got to work.

In addition, the project tagline also came into being: the “Sweet Delight Project” — “Our wish is for everyone to smile and love each other.”, which was taken from Jessica’s very own single: “Sweet Delight”.

PH Sones became united in donating for Operation Smile. Filipino Sones from other provinces no matter how far also donated for this project. It was also not limited to local sones, since to everyone’s surprise, some Sones in Singapore and Indonesia also donated for Operation Smile.

To promote the project more, SSFph also coordinated with KFEST Manila Events Management (http://www.facebook….pandculturefest) to have a booth during KFEST Cosplay Con (March 27, 2011) and luckily they gave us a free both to have the chance to promote it in the said event. Eventually we collected around Php 9,000 ($210) during that day — Power of 9 yo!

Then just last Thursday (May 05, 2011) — Children’s Day in Korea — some SSFph representatives visited Operation Smile’s main office in Makati and handed out a total of Php22,400 ($520) to Mr. Robert J. Manzano (President and Exec. Director). At first we were a bit shy handing out the donation because we thought it was a small amount to them, but little did we know that our donation could change the lives of 2-3 children… forever! That made us SMILE.

“Yesterday, Soshified Philippines handed their donations to Operation Smile Philippines. The donations will be used in healing facial deformities of children. Thank you very much and let us continue on healing children one smile at a time! “

Since this was the first time Filipino Sones did a charity project for SNSD, we were pretty much happy with the result since it was a success! We want those children to smile, like how SNSD made us smile.